When I came to Christ in January of 1978, I was the kind of person that could read the Bible for many hours, but I had a hard [difficult] time praying for more than a couple of minutes.

All that changed in June of 1978 when I received the baptism of the Holy Spirit and began to speak in tongues. Within a few months I was able to pray for a long time without getting bored.

Occasionally, while I was praying for something, my heart started getting weighed down with the burden of the thing I was praying for. It was so heavy with the sense of why I was praying that I had a difficult time having a conversation with someone. I could barely do anything else but pray because my mind and heart was so preoccupied with this intense weight or burden. When this "spirit of prayer" came on me, the kind when my whole being was engulfed in prayer, I would try to alter my schedule and steal away from all regular work and the company of others. I would get alone and pray until the burden of the thing I was praying for would lift off of me and my heart would be filled with the peace and assurance of God.

Through the years this spirit of prayer would only come upon me occasionally. Then it would come upon me for days at a time—then weeks—most of the time I couldn't even use my known language (English) and after some years, the intensity of the burden even transcended "speaking in tongues" with most of my time spent groaning in the presence of God, knowing that I was standing in the gap for something.

(Before I go on, I want the reader to realize something important. You can pray anytime you want but you can't make [cause] "the spirit of prayer" to come upon you. You can't just decide that you want to go into "travail." It comes upon you only when God wills it to happen, usually when you begin to intercede for something and you strike a "nerve" in the spirit. God enlarges your heart and you begin to pray supernaturally with an intensity that can only come from God).

It got to the point in the late 1980s that I realized about 95 percent of the time when I began to pray I would tap into God's heart for the thing I was praying for and then I would go into travail with varying degrees of time spent praying fervently according to the need.

I remember a time in the early 1990s when I went to a conference hosted by an apostolic network. A pastor I had only met a few times before was driving me there.

Dr. Mark Rutland's

National Institute of Christian Leadership (NICL)

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